Overall, I find this thread really fascinating. To me it`s not even about the NMS itself anymore but about it being another example of gaming groupthink. I bet if this game was just some unknown thing, Kickstarted by couple of starving devs with no SONY stigma attached, we would see a 100+ page thread here with people tripping over each other just to say how much they love this concept (That Which Sleeps for example).
Instead, folk bleat on about Spore, walking sims (despite all the info against this tired cliche) and how proc gen sucks and how we need a structure and direction or some such...it`s quite funny really. There`s zillion other similar games on this forum with similar MO - including the very game which is the reason we`re all here - and they`re okay. Bu tNMS sucks and will crash and burn though. Roll on, teh intehwebs 
It looks like you think I'm one of the big "bleaters." Baa.
1. I had no idea that it had become an AAA-published game. I thought that it was still indie. I have been criticizing it as an indie game, which is the context in which "getting overly excited about proc. gen." is usually a problem.
2. What evidence against the tired cliche of walking sims? There is a variety of games like
Journey or whatever, or
Proteus, or (I could go on) that have been very popular and are about, well... mostly simulating walking through a beautiful environment. There's all of those "zen games," too. I realize that "walking sim" is an old pejorative, but if the top selling point here is "exploring a beautiful procedurally generated environment," then it fits with those other ones. Whether it has spaceships or is about ~feelings~ or not. That was the point of the categorization.
3. I do not, have not, and never will play DF because it's not the kind of game that I like. Believe it or not, I came here to play Mafia.
It really pisses me off when I put a lot of effort into explaining "I prefer X for a few reasons, this is in category Y, I will not like it regardless of whether it is "good" or not but I think that there are z1, z2, ... zn questions that we could use to reframe the conversation" I get back "So you're saying that this thing sucks because it's Category Y!!"
I don't think that there's any need to get offended? Unless you also get offended when people see an argument about meat and say "I'm a vegetarian so I don't have any skin in the game, but I thought these questions might be helpful?"
Also, I struggle to think of any of these alleged procedural games that are so unexciting. What are they? Civ? Spelunky? Elite? Dwarf Fortress?
quelle surprise, a list of games that I don't play. Because I find them unexciting. See also: Alpha Centauri, The Binding of Isaac, AudioSurf, Crypt of the NecroDancer... and on and on. They were definitely objectively good games, but they didn't hold my attention in the same way that, say, the Tales and Final Fantasy games do. I prefer puzzle and role-playing games, almost always in linear, human-designed contexts these days.
I finished exactly one playthrough of BoI, one playthrough of AC, and one playthrough of CivII. I figured out a winning strategy for the goal that I found most interesting and I didn't want to play those games anymore, because that's the kind of person I am. The procedural generation made everything too samey because I had developed a strategy that took it into account. Call me shallow if you like, but it's just not my thing. When I used to play .Hack//SIGN, I was able to figure out the rules that the designers used to make the dungeons. I could look at the floor plan and say: "ok, treasure chest that way, boss fight this way." I was never wrong, because they didn't put in rules to subvert their rules. It was really boring. Procedural generation has come a long way since then, but that experience stuck with me. I can't get excited about doing a dungeon built on the same rules as the last dungeon, populated by reskinned creatures with one-two attack patterns apiece, with treasures put within a certain randomized range.
Will NMS be like that?
I don't know. I really hope not!
I did not like Final Fantasy XII because it started using more procedural generation elements like dropping infinity+1 swords randomly in such-and-such dungeon, attached to such-and-such boss monster. Any game where I have to play it over and over and over and over again in order to *possibly* get the particular thing I'm looking for is not one I like. This includes virtually any game which has a completion list based on random drops of extremely rare designed items. You can work out the probabilities: "So... I'll have to kill 500 slimes. No thanks!"
A game that worked well with that is Stardew Valley, which both has a luck variable and various things that you can do to control that luck variable. It was still a matter of luck, but there was something you could do about it in the long term.
I've also never played a game with randomly designed items (for example--Borderlands 2) that I enjoyed. I get to feeling like the game is handing me the same damn thing over and over again.
There's a certain point when I realize that I'm just sitting there waiting for the random number generator to hand me something and I have no control over when I get it. Or the world is developed predictably, and I can read it. One example of when that worked really well was Logical Journey of the Zoombinis, because the point was to become good at that variety of meta-thinking. But--most of these proc. gen. games do not take their legibility in that matter into account, whether as part of the worldbuilding or as part of the gameplay that they expect.
Also, I think that the title you're looking for is called "Starbound."
Author
Topic: No Man's Sky - 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 planets to explore (Read 145935 times)